13 ms·
Ask HN: What is something impressive you have built or achieved?
One of the question from the YC application is "Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved".
This might be a good question to ask everyone by posting it here because there are a lot of people in this community that have achieved or built impressive thing.
What is something impressive you have built or achieved?
- swolchok 17y agoFound remotely-exploitable security vulnerabilities in China's no-longer-mandated Green Dam censorware, resulting in my first Slashdotting: http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654107 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=654107
- run4yourlives 17y agoMy Sons. (Still building them, as a co-contributor) What, not the answer you were looking for? :)
- mixmax 17y agoExactly the nerdy answer I was expecting. Make sure you clear out the bugs and get a clean build early on, it'll save you a lot of trouble later.
- run4yourlives 17y agoNo way, these things are clearly products of successive iterations. No waterfall technique here. :-)
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jey 17y agoHope you're not also applying the "plan to throw the first one away" principle...
- run4yourlives 17y agohehe, no we're building out the prototype.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- rguzman 17y agorelease early, release often?
- wlievens 17y agoEspecially when practicing.
- alain94040 17y agoSounds like a good lead for bragging, but not sure if this community actually encourages it. I'll go with: first to write a mainstream article with the word "Internet" in 1992 (at least where I lived at the time). To add some balance: first to miss the Internet revolution in 1993, sounded like old news to me :-)
- cosmok 17y agoPersonal bookmarker and web-history search.
- zasz 17y agoI just finished cycling across America yesterday. I didn't go on my own, since researching the route would have been very time consuming, and I'm too weak to push both myself and my luggage up a hill. I went with a touring company, America by Bicycle, instead. I highly recommend them. Their website's www.abbike.com. It doesn't look professional, but it's run by a bunch of cyclists who know what they're doing. (But given the nature of this site, I wish I could post something really intellectual or otherwise related to hacking instead.) ----- Addenda: very frequently asked questions: What was the mileage per day? About 80 miles. The shortest day was 38 miles, the longest was 120. What was the group size? About 50. The average age was 58, which surprised me. I expected to see a bunch of retired people, but I was the only recent college grad. The youngest person was a girl who had just graduated from high school; the oldest was an 80 year old man. What was your fitness level prior to the ride? I ran at the gym for maybe 10 minutes, perhaps every other week. I was not especially fit, had never done any sports and was generally unathletic. Imagine my surprise when the tour booklet came two and a half months before I was to leave, recommending a year of training prior to the ride. =( Anyway, I put in about 1000 miles of training in those two and a half months. I was so afraid they would kick me out for being unfit that I didn't even dare ask them if they had that policy, lest it be true. It was pretty dumb of me to worry, in retrospect, since they'll just pick you up in a van if you can't make it to the next checkpoint, but I wanted the trip so badly that I avoided the thought of failure as much as possible. How fast did you ride? The strongest riders probably averaged 20 mph. I think the 80 year old man averaged 12-13 mph in the hilly places like Oregon. He was terribly slow at going up hills, but the descents made up for it a bit. I started out averaging 11-12 mph, but with lots of help and mentoring I moved up to 14-16, depending on the terrain and wind.
- nwatson 17y agotechnically, helped build products http://www.sensage.com http://www.sensage.com and http://www.zenprise.com http://www.zenprise.com ... two very good software development experiences with some great development (and business) teams.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Mz 17y agoGot myself well when that's not supposed to be possible. Now living my life-long dream of a "normal" life: working for the weekend, saying things like "TGIF" and doing other ordinary working stiff type things.
- trapper 17y agoHow and from what (if it's ok to ask)
- Mz 17y agoWhat: After spending 3 1/2 months bedridden, I was diagnosed in May 2001 with "atypical cystic fibrosis" in my mid-thirties. Doctors blamed my condition on my genes. I figured there had to be more to it than that. How: I have a small website that attempts to answer that question: http://www.healthgazelle.com http://www.healthgazelle.com To sum up my point of view: White people are more vulnerable to sunburn than darker-skinned people but "pale skin disorder" does not doom you to be chronically sunburned to the point of peeling and does not doom you to die at an early age of skin cancer. Similarly, cystic fibrosis makes one more vulnerable to infection, but one does not have to accept being sick all the time as their only fate. It takes both pale skin and sunlight to cause sunburn. It takes both CF and germs to make one deathly ill. The environmental and lifestyle part is what we can control. So far, so good.
- jackchristopher 17y agoHave you looked into healthy fats? My skin likes pastured (grass fed) butter, coconut milk/oil and very dark chocolate. Vitamins D3 and a DHA & EPA (Omega 3s) source like fish (krill oil) should do the skin well too. Also green and white tea w/ lemon no sugar killed acne. Favorite health blog: wholehealthsource.blogspot.com
- Mz 17y agoI do a lot of organic butter and coconut oil. I talk about that on the site. It's not the only thing I focus on, but it is one of the things that has been helpful.
- p01nd3xt3r 17y agoDeveloped a sales forecasting algorithm that turned out to be within 5% of actual sales numbers over a 18 month period. Note: I don't know how its performing now because I switched jobs.
- jpwagner 17y agoWould you mind talking about this with me? jpwagner [at> mit <dotty] edu Thanks!
- jbr 17y agoIsn't it weird leaving that sort of thing behind? I also built a "purchase prediction model" right before I left a startup. It did really well on the test portion of the data (which wasn't included when building the model), but I have no idea how it's performing in the wild. It's stranger than leaving something like a program that has a clear function, because it's not necessarily obvious how well the model is performing compared to how well it "could" be performing. Have you thought about getting ahold of them to find out how it performs now, just for curiosity's sake?
- p01nd3xt3r 17y agoActually yes it was weird and kind of sad because the developers that I left to maintain it are kind of morons (IMHO). I never really considered asking them how it was doing now; I have been so busy working on other projects but I would like to know.
- Mankhool 17y agoThanks for the boost on my YC application. When I was in university I made a short film and sold it to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and it aired nationally.
- Keyframe 17y agoCan it be viewed somewhere online or otherwise?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- darwinw 17y agoSingle handedly created http://Tripntale.com http://Tripntale.com
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Cantdog 17y agoA spaceship sends messages to a logging system I built (That's the coolest way I could phrase interning at NASA)
- bgnm2000 17y agoI created a website that 3/4 of my college started using - and still uses now that I'm gone - solely through word of mouth. menumunchies.com - for those interested
- dmfdmf 17y agoLead systems engineer for ABWR Feedwater Control System Units 1 & 2, Lungmen Nuclear Power Station in Taiwan. Designed it 10yrs ago, just going online now. http://www.power-technology.com/projects/lungmen/ http://www.power-technology.com/projects/lungmen/
- edw519 17y agoI made my mother laugh when nothing else could. Everything else I have ever achieved is a distant second.
- zkz 17y agoI personally have a problem finding my most impressive achievement not impressive at all from the instant it's done. Anyone else?
- swolchok 17y agoI actually had a lot of trouble with too much ego boost in the days after. I hope I'll handle the next impressive achievement more modestly.
- anigbrowl 17y agoYes, I know exactly what you mean. It's intensely demotivating - all I can advise is a supportive partner and friends, and occasional professional help.
- thomanil 17y agoFound my Better Half. Fathered my daughter. Built v.1 of http://thoughtmuse.com http://thoughtmuse.com singlehandedly on nights and weekends, in under five months (as estimated).
- modoc 17y agoBuilt 10MinuteMail.com to learn Seam. The site now gets over 100,000 hits/day. Started Sparkred.com and have been profitable while competing against much larger established players. Built a woodshed that didn't fall over from the snow last winter. Built a closet that makes my wife happy. Built a desk that makes me happy.
- Keyframe 17y agoPersuaded my girlfriend to be with me.
- mofey 17y ago+1
- nick007 17y agothat got a vote out of jealousy
- davidw 17y agoThat rings true with me. I've done some cool hacks here and there, but marrying an intelligent, beautiful woman, and having a wonderful daughter are pretty high up on the list for someone who wasn't always terribly well adapted, socially. In terms of hacks, the thing I like the most is Hecl: http://www.hecl.org http://www.hecl.org
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mahmud 17y agoI got my father $80k to pay the IRS within 48 hours. At the time, I was 21 years old, making $6/hr working full time at starbucks, and was in a bachelor house with other college kids. He called me and said I could go to the office and take the fridge, TV and whatever else I liked, because there will be nothing left of it by January 7th, first federal working day, and IRS was coming to take it all. They already froze his accounts and step-mom packed her stuff and left for Canada. I called him from the office to ask him for the password so I can check my email. I played some music, stood there and decided to take a look at his business software. The rest was history. We did a lot of apologizing to people later, and we lost 5% of our clients, but the feds where paid, we kept the family business, and we paid people back within a month. Since then, I have fucked up and fucked up big. Me and him fought repeatedly. He disapproved of my life choices and sometimes we didn't talk for weeks, but STILL, every time I screw up he tells me I am a very gifted screw-up and loves me very much.
- clistctrl 17y agoyou skipped over the best part... how did you do it?
- tobych 17y agoA small proportion of data from four spaceships send data that is decompressed by my code. Oh, and I found a bug in code in the the same spaceships. Wrote an spreadsheet, and interactive disassembler, in BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler when I was sixteen. Still seems the most impressive thing I ever did... but perhaps it wasn't actually. Um ah.
- javanix 17y agoIt wasn't really overly special - but I built and debugged a full web app from the ground up including MySQL backend, (simple) scripting language, and design/logic in about a month on deadline earlier this summer.
- pingswept 17y agoI converted a Porsche 914 to electric power. http://www.evalbum.com/573.html http://www.evalbum.com/573.html
- manish 17y agoThat's a neat hack
- kvs 17y ago"invented" something small but useful in CS. Won some reserach competition, got invited to the Turing Award ceremoney, got an award on the same stage right after Vincent Cerf and Rob Khan got thier Turing Award. Goose bumps :-)
- dansdans 17y agoSo what was it? So intriguing.
- jubos 17y agogot ie6 and ie7 running on the same windows install.
- terpua 17y agoWas temporarily paralyzed from neck down (it seemed permanent at the time) from a major car accident but managed to crack jokes with the paramedics on the way to ICU. Ended up with fractured C3 to C5 and ripped ligaments and had 2 major operations and a halo device. I was 15 yo.
- mofey 17y agoI'm hearing about people around me getting into serious accidents. Aren't seat belts and air bags supposed to prevent these kind of injuries?
- mkramlich 17y agoHard to compete with some of the great things accomplished by others here (spaceships, businesses, businesses that process logs from spaceships while cycling around the country in spaceships while making your mother laugh about a nuclear power plant you helped build that hopefully does not run Windows, etc.), BUT I'll try anyway and throw out my Dead By Zombie game (http://DeadByZombie.com http://DeadByZombie.com), whose Windows port just launched last week. It has a Rogue-like UI style but is otherwise very different from a Rogue-like in terms of play style and goals. I tend to develop several new hobby projects each year from scratch, outside my day job in software development, and then release them and try to monetize them in various ways. By HN standards, probably pretty simple and unimpressive. I think it's just good to be creative and productive. By my standards, it's impressive to be doing things like this rather than merely sitting around watching TV or making inane chit-chat at bars, like so many Americans seem to do. (Though there's value in doing even those in moderation.) Live, love, think, create, do, repeat. A life full of that is what impresses me.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- wlievens 17y agoBuilt a webgame that has had a small (400 users) but very dedicated following for over four years.
- kvogt 17y agocracked a safe with a robot http://web.mit.edu/kvogt/www/safecracker.html http://web.mit.edu/kvogt/www/safecracker.html
- richardw 17y agoOnce designed and created a system to manage very complex ethnobotanical information, so we could define rules like "X company reserves all samples taken from Q parts of plants that might be related to people speaking Y language from Z area using words that hint at it helping their stomach." Another system - "it must tell us everything about e.g. nanotechnology and Japan". Recognised countries, technologies, projects, did implicit search on internal document databases, internal project databases, CIA world factbook, stored URL's, Google's API etc. Showed links, e.g. team X went to Japan in 2004, team Y dealt with nanotech in 2001, there are two reports here that deal with X, Bob stored these related URL's, etc. May not impress some, but I really enjoyed those projects and they were helluva challenging!
- fsniper 17y agofilmed our friend for his proposal to his girl friend and merged in a Hollywood movie. The interesting part is making him - who does not know any English - read English. He could not manage to read and look into the camera at the same time so I cut a hole in the paper and put the paper around the camera. :)
- geuis 17y agoHacked the Google VPN client that was released a few years ago to work with non google pptp networks. Did that within a couple days of it being released. Not the most impressive but it was fun.
- stewiecat 17y agoTook 2.5 hours of my Ironman triathlon time. Went from a 15 hour race to a 12.5 hour race, which I managed to repeat last year.
- ssanders82 17y agoAwesome man, what were your swim/bike/run splits?
- stewiecat 17y ago1:14 swim (5 minutes faster than first) 6:13:55 bike (way faster than the first, like over an hour and change) 4:43 run (about 45-50 minutes faster than the first) First was Wisconsin, second was Lake Placid.
- dcminter 17y agoLearnt to dance. Ok, I'm still learning (and always will be) but I went from absolutely hating dancing to being a competent social swing dancer in a year - just coming up to the anniversary of my first lesson in fact.
- NoBSWebDesign 17y agoI built a predictive model for finding the maximum temperatures of the core components of heavy-duty alternators, which cut the alternator testing cycle for the biggest Tier 1 automotive supplier in the world down from 3 months to about a day and a half. Two PhD's had been trying for 2 years before me to accomplish this. It was meant to be an educational exercise, but last I heard, they were still using it to get new business.
- happymonkey00 17y agoHelped build a cardiovascular diagramming system that converts diagnostic(textual) reports of kids with congenital heart defects to "circuit diagrams" of the heart annotated with various cardiovascular measurements.
- ssanders82 17y agoAfter months and months of late-night coding sessions, created http://www.howmucharestamps.com http://www.howmucharestamps.com :)
- mrlyc 17y agoI wrote a bulletin board in 1984 on a Commodore Vic20. It had public and private rooms (message areas), private mail and an online game, all in 9.6K of BASIC. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. I ran it on the Vic for six months then rewrote it in Turbo Pascal and ran it for eighteen months on an XT clone with 384K (I couldn't afford the full 640) and one floppy. There was no hard drive. The board was very popular. Each user spent an average of 70 minutes on it.
- mrlyc 17y agoRewrote 2,650 lines of C as a seven line shell script. The previous programming team had written a data transfer program using their own implementation of ftp. I just used the one that was already on the computer.
- Gibbon 17y agoI set 52 national records, tied a world record and won a category at the nationals in model aircraft competitions when I was 15. Two of the records were set at a contest on a sat and I won the nationals at another contest on sunday.. the two contests were 1000 miles apart.